CHAPTER ONE: First Line, Last Breath
The rain hadn’t stopped in three days.
Saumya sat hunched at his writing desk, fingers limp over the keyboard, the cursor blinking with the rhythmic cruelty of a ticking clock. He hadn’t written a word in weeks—months, if he was honest with himself. His last novel had sold well enough to keep his lights on, but not enough to quiet the critics, nor the voice in his head that whispered he’d already peaked.
The voice was louder now. It spoke in silence, in unfinished sentences, in the sound of rain against the windowpanes like fingers tapping to be let in.
The desk lamp flickered once, twice, and then dimmed into a steady amber glow. Saumya’s study, lined wall to wall with sagging bookshelves, seemed smaller than usual—more like a mausoleum than a workspace. The smell of dust and dried ink settled into the air, thick and tired.
He stared at the blank page. Somewhere inside him, a story waited.
Then he heard it.
A voice, faint as breath. A whisper, but unmistakable:
“She never knew this was her last morning alive.”
Saumya blinked. His fingers twitched. He didn’t question it. He simply typed.
She never knew this was her last morning alive.
The sentence settled on the screen like a final breath. His pulse quickened, but he wasn’t sure why. It was a good line—unoriginal maybe, but sharp enough to pierce the veil of whatever fog had clogged his imagination.
He sat back, exhaled, and ran a hand through his unkempt hair.
A sharp crack of thunder rattled the windows. Saumya jumped. The lights dimmed again, this time more decisively, before recovering to their low hum. He stood and crossed the room, peering through the rain-streaked glass. Across the street, the old Victorian house that belonged to Mrs. Harrow was dark—unusually so.
She always left the porch light on. Always.
Saumya waited a moment longer, staring, squinting through the downpour. No sign of movement. Just the skeletal silhouette of the house behind the rippling curtain of rain.
He turned away from the window, unsettled but unable to name why. That line—it still echoed in his head. Like he hadn’t thought it up but remembered it.
She never knew this was her last morning alive.
It didn’t feel like fiction.
He sat back at the desk, rereading the words. He typed another sentence—tentatively, carefully, like moving through a haunted room.
The kettle had just started to hiss when she collapsed on the kitchen tiles, the blue ones she hated but never replaced.
That felt like her. Mrs. Harrow. Blue tiles. A pale green kettle in her little kitchen. Saumya had only been inside once, years ago, but the image came with eerie clarity now, vivid in his mind.
He stopped, heart thudding.
Was he writing a scene from his imagination… or his memory?
Shaking it off, Saumya saved the file and pushed himself up from the chair. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and even that had been little more than coffee and burnt toast.
As he stepped into the hallway, his phone buzzed.
He dug it out of his pocket—Unknown Number. He hesitated, thumb hovering over the screen. Then he answered.
“Hello?”
No response. Just the low hum of static—and something else. A whisper. Almost a breath:
“You wrote it.”
Click. The line went dead.
Saumya stood frozen in the doorway, staring at the dark screen in his hand. The house seemed to draw in a breath of its own, walls creaking, rain thudding louder on the roof.
Then came the sirens.
Faint at first, then growing louder—emergency vehicles. An ambulance. The sound passed his house, tires hissing on wet pavement, lights reflecting off the windowpane like flickering ghosts. They stopped in front of Mrs. Harrow’s house.
Saumya’s breath caught.
He moved back to the window. The scene unfolded in a blur of flashing red and blue. Paramedics rushed through the door. A neighbor—Mr. Laird, from two houses down—stood out front in his robe, talking to an officer, face pale. Saumya could just barely make out the words on his lips.
“I found her on the floor. Just collapsed. Gone before I could even call.”
The world slowed.
Saumya staggered back from the window. The words—the sentence—still fresh on the screen behind him.
She never knew this was her last morning alive.
His legs gave a soft tremble. He sat on the edge of the couch, staring at nothing, hearing everything—the ticking clock, the dripping faucet, the typing sound that shouldn’t be happening because he wasn’t at the keyboard anymore.
He turned.
The screen was no longer blank. There were more words now. A new paragraph he didn’t remember writing.
She had been afraid for days. Of shadows that moved without light. Of stories whispered behind walls. But she never imagined someone else was writing the ending.
Saumya’s blood went cold.
CHAPTER TWO: Character Notes
The next morning, Saumya awoke with the strangest sensation: like a thread had been tugged loose somewhere in his sleep.
He rolled out of bed groggy and uncertain, drifting to his desk with the robotic grace of ritual. The manuscript glowed faintly on his screen—still open from the night before. The paragraphs were exactly as he left them. Except… they weren’t.
A new document had appeared beside the main draft: “Gray_CharacterNotes.docx.”
He didn’t remember creating it.
Saumya opened it cautiously. Inside were detailed notes about a character named Gray. The file read like a forensic profile, but intimate, like it had been written by someone who knew him better than he knew himself.
Name: Gray
Age: Indeterminate (likely 30s)
Traits: Introspective, anxious, sharp-eyed, easily detached from reality
Habits: Collects paperclips compulsively. Writes to make sense of the world. Stares at mirrors too long. Sleeps with the window open, even when it rains.
Fears: Losing control. Becoming a character in someone else’s story.
Saumya leaned back, stunned.
He had done this before, in past projects—written out characters in full to help them feel real. But this felt too... specific. Too familiar.
He looked to his desk drawer, almost on instinct. Slowly, he slid it open.
Inside was a tidy spiral of paperclips.
He hadn’t bought paperclips in years.
For the rest of the day, Saumya spiraled.
He told himself it was nothing—his memory was just frayed, maybe he had written the file in a fugue of inspiration. That happened to writers. But the certainty kept slipping through his fingers like smoke.
That night, he typed feverishly, desperate to regain control. Gray took shape with alarming speed. The more he wrote, the more Gray morphed into something... uncomfortable. Saumya kept giving him little autobiographical pieces without meaning to—his insomnia, his dreams of falling, his failed relationships.
The character didn’t feel fictional. He felt extracted.
At 2:14 a.m., the screen glitched—just once, just for a second.
And when it cleared, a new sentence was there. One he hadn’t typed.
Gray knows he’s not real. But he suspects the writer isn’t either.
Saumya stared.
The room fell silent, except for the distant tick of the hallway clock and the low sound—impossible, he swore it wasn’t there a moment ago—of typing.
Somewhere else in the house.
He moved slowly toward the noise. Down the stairs, into the hallway, toward the door to the basement.
The door was slightly open.
The typing was louder now, mechanical and steady, as if a second version of himself were down there, echoing his every move in reverse. He wanted to flee, but curiosity, always stronger than fear, pulled him down.
He flipped the light.
The basement was empty.
Dusty floor. Closed windows. A desk in the far corner—an old one, from his childhood home. It hadn’t been there before.
On it: a manual typewriter.
Still warm. Still ticking.
A single page was rolled into it. Just one line:
You’re not the only one writing this anymore.

CHAPTER THREE: A Voice on the Page
Saumya didn’t sleep.
He sat at the edge of his bed with the basement page in his hands. The line repeated in his head like a whisper he couldn’t silence:
You’re not the only one writing this anymore.
The air felt heavier now, like the walls were leaning in. Every object in his home—the books, the paintings, the curtains—felt placed. Not chosen. Not his.
When he returned to his desk at dawn, the manuscript was waiting.
Not just waiting—updated.
More paragraphs. Pages he hadn’t written. Dialogue he didn’t recognize. The character Gray was no longer just reacting to things; he was investigating the nature of his own world. Following clues. Asking questions. Talking to people Saumya hadn’t created.
The strangest part?
He started referring to the writer.
“He doesn’t sleep anymore,” Gray said to the girl at the café. “He’s afraid he’ll wake up here.”
“The writer?”
Gray nodded. “He thinks I’m the character. But I think we’re both caught in something neither of us started.”
Saumya felt cold to his bones.
He opened a fresh document to test something. Just to see.
He typed:
Gray walks into the old library and finds nothing but dust.
He saved it.
Seconds later, the manuscript refreshed.
The scene was there. Word for word. But Gray wasn’t following the script.
Instead, he stood in the center of the library and said:
“He thinks he controls this.”
“He thinks I’m going to do what he tells me.”
“He doesn’t understand that once you write yourself into the story, you can’t write yourself out.”
That evening, Saumya began hearing things again. Not just whispers this time. Pages turning in other rooms. A chair scraping softly upstairs. The clicking of a mouse that wasn’t his.
He printed out the manuscript—hundreds of pages now—and laid them across the floor. As he flipped through them, something jumped out.
A new character had been introduced.
She hadn’t been in his outline. She hadn’t been in his head.
Name: Mira.
Role: Observer. Memory-keeper. Unreliable narrator.
Status: Outside the narrative. Watching the writer.
Mira was different. She spoke in riddles. She warned Gray. She referred to events that hadn’t happened yet. Or hadn’t happened to them.
At first, she seemed like a background figure. But now she was in every chapter. Every conversation.
And she was beginning to talk about Saumya.
Not the writer. Not “he.”
“Saumya thinks this is his story,” Mira told Gray. “But stories don’t belong to writers. They belong to readers. And someone else is reading him now.”
“Who?”
Mira just smiled. “Me.”
By midnight, Saumya had only one thought in his head:
If Mira was real... if Gray was more than fiction...
Then what did that make him?

CHAPTER FOUR: Reflections
The first mirror cracked at 3:33 a.m.
Saumya had just passed it in the hallway when he heard the sharp, splintering sound. He turned in time to see the silver web bloom across the glass, as if from an invisible impact.
He didn’t touch it. He didn’t have to.
Because in that moment—before the crack fully formed—he saw something wrong with his reflection.
It had blinked... late.
He spent the rest of the night dismantling his apartment.
Not out of panic. Not even fear. Out of suspicion.
He checked the backs of picture frames. Behind furniture. Under the floorboards in his bedroom. He ripped open a sealed vent and found a single typewritten page folded neatly inside:
Stop writing.
Let the story end, or you’ll be the next character.
—M
Mira.
The next morning, his laptop refused to open any browser.
Every search engine redirected to a blank white page with a blinking cursor. When he typed anything—“What is happening to me”, “How to know if you’re real”, “Is Saumya a character”—the screen responded with a single line:
You tell me.
And then the screen would refresh…
...into his manuscript.
The document was now over 300 pages. Every chapter began to reflect his real life. Characters mentioned things he hadn’t told anyone: the story about his sister’s old music box, the exact number of steps to the attic, the text message from an ex he’d never replied to but never deleted.
And Gray was no longer just a character.
Gray had started to write back.
There was now a “notes” section at the end of every chapter, addressed directly to Saumya.
You think this is your story. But you’ve written yourself into me.
You’re a fiction writing fiction, Saumya.
Soon, someone else will be reading you.
Saumya printed out the latest chapter and rushed to the mirror again. Not the cracked one. The tall one in the bedroom, unbroken.
He held the page to his chest and looked into the glass.
His reflection wasn’t holding the paper.
It was smiling.
He stumbled back, the air heavy with static. The typewriter in the basement had begun typing on its own. He heard the clicks echo up the stairwell—slow, deliberate, endless.
He grabbed the printout and ran. Not sure where. Maybe to find someone, anyone, who could see it too. But when he opened his front door…
...there was only white.
Not fog. Not snow.
Just... blankness. A void. Like the end of a page with no words written on it yet.
He stepped back inside and slammed the door.
Then he heard her voice for the first time.
Soft. Right behind him.
“You shouldn’t have written me.”
He turned. Mira stood in the center of the room—exactly as she was described in the manuscript. Red scarf. Notebook in hand. Bare feet on the wood floor.
Eyes like he’d known her forever and never at all.
“I didn’t,” he said, breath shallow. “I don’t remember—”
“You didn’t make me,” she replied. “You found me. You pulled me in when you stopped writing the world and started writing yourself.”
She stepped forward.
“But stories don’t like being caged. They find their way out.”
Saumya’s voice trembled. “Out where?”
“Into you.”

CHAPTER FIVE: The Story Writes Back
The typewriter had stopped.
Saumya sat in front of it, trembling. Mira stood in the shadows just beyond its warm circle of light, notebook closed, arms folded.
“Why me?” he asked.
“You were the first to stop pretending it was all yours,” she said. “The first to leave cracks in the story.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Doesn’t matter. Stories don’t care about meaning. They care about truth.”
She tossed the notebook onto the desk. Its pages flipped open without her touching them. Inside: lines of text, perfectly aligned. Familiar words. His words.
Except they were from before he’d written them. From journals he hadn’t opened in years. From conversations he never recorded.
From dreams.
Saumya walks into the room. He sits at the desk. He sees himself on the page.
He scanned the text. It was describing now. Every second. Every movement. He flipped ahead, panicked.
He turns the page.
He begins to understand.
He doesn’t like what he reads next.
His hand froze.
He doesn’t like what he reads next.
“I want to stop,” he said aloud. “I want to end this.”
“You already did,” Mira said. “That’s what endings are. They’re just places where stories loop back.”
She reached for the typewriter and pulled the page free. On it was a final passage.
One that he had never written. One that ended everything.
The writer finally realizes the truth.
That he was never outside the story.
That he was the last character all along.
And that now—his story ends so another can begin.
She placed the page gently in front of him.
The words shimmered.
The letters rearranged.
Line by line, his name dissolved from the text.
Saumya was—
Gone.
He opened his mouth to scream, but there was no sound.
He looked down at his hands.
Ink. Only ink.
They were fading—his arms, his chest, his outline. Like pencil rubbed thin at the edges. As if he were being edited out. Deleted.
Mira stepped forward and looked at him—not with pity, not with cruelty.
With authorship.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Your story made mine possible.”
“You—” he gasped. “You were never fictional.”
She smiled, and her eyes sparkled with something he recognized now—because it had once lived inside him.
Creation.
The last thing he saw before the world turned white again…
Was Mira, sitting at the typewriter.
Her fingers rested gently on the keys.
And then she began to write.
THE END
—or the beginning.